Slashdot Mirror
China Plots Cyberspace War Strategy
gaijin|dog writes "According to this article in the Washington Times, China has said that Internet warfare should be equated to combat operations for air, land and sea forces. Communications, transportation, finance, electrical power networks and other critical services in the US are listed as likely targets. Kinda scary considering the resources China could use against us." My personal opinion: this article is a dizzy mix of fact and scare-mongering. But you ought to read it for yourself and make up your own mind how valid it is.
What's really neat is that it shows the importance of the Internet- not that anyone who reads Slashdot questions the role of the Internet in business, government, and personal use- but it's neat to see that controlling the Internet and an enemies computer networks as viewed as important as controlling an enemies land, sea, and airspace.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
The UN/Geneva conventions have set out rules for things like biological warfare, and nuclear weapons. Why don't we get off our duffs and do something about cyber warfare? The US has admitted to using cyber warefare as a means to an end during the Yugaslavia conflict. I'm sure China will also do so if it feels threatened.
The problem is that some people might not notice that, yes, there is a problem with it. It's not "clean" warfare -- what if your mission critical computer that is 'net connected goes down? This same system could be responsible for life support for hospital patients, or perhaps tracking the course of some satalites (the Shuttle doesn't stand up to well to colissions).
Can we really take the risk of letting people distrupt, either directly or indirectly, the infrastructure that a lot of people rely on? Something that could lead to deaths?
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If the government starts doing this sorta thing in a war-type situation, then wouldn't that make it pretty much open season on most any system in that country for practically anyone in the other country? I mean, say our gov't starts messing with Chinese systems. Are any actions going to be taken against freelance attackers as well? It seems they wouldn't. While the idea kinda sucks, it might be a good opportunity for all the wannabe(Cr)(H)ackers to practice up, or learn some stuff. btw, while not completely serious, I do think this is an interesting idea.
The real point of this article is that China is trying to make itself powerful in any way it can. America is currently very vulnerable to electronic attack. So vulnerable that if an attack were mounted, we might not know how to react.
When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, we knew immediately what to do. It meant war. If China were to take down one of the Pentagon's networks for a few days, what would we do about it? The confusion it would generate is far more scary than even a clearly defined first strike. When people are confused, they make mistakes. Between China and the US, the mistakes could get big.
But enough talk about apocalypse... For now it is mostly just blustering. I think the best thing that could come out of this is that the US and other contries might develop electronic warfare departments of their own. If it hasn't happened already, I hope the US has plans in place detailing what we will do if we are attacked over the Net. I know we already have some sort of an electronic warfare division, but I'm sure the bulk of it is classified.
Do you think we'll see an official US govt. response to this newly publicised threat?
"Modern high-tech warfare cannot win without the Net"
The above is a quote from the article and is, IMO, complete rubbish. I am not saying that internet warfare would not be an effective means of disrupting the functioning of a large, technlogised country. But to state that a war could not be won without using the Net is garbage.
One squadron of B2 stealth bombers could completely obliterate most small countries before their populace new they were there. How the hell does this kind of aggresive, decisive action involve the internet?
Another example is the air war fought against Iraq in 1990. That operation could be repeated again, with even greater success, tomorrow. In exactly the same fashion. Hell, the bombing raids could probably use the same flight patterns. Denial of service would be far easier to achieve using a physical attack. Why not just airburst a small nuke over Wall Street? EMP is far more effective, more direct, then DoS attacks over the internet.
By all means, hack government and community systems to cause confusion, unrest and inconvenience. But the effective use of electronic warfare has virtually nothing to do with the Internet.
Cya,
Gomez
1a: Go out there on that battlefield, and kill as many people as you can. (NOTE: Killing is illegal, but in times of war, Go for it.)
1b: Go out there on that network, and kill as many workstations as you can. (NOTE: System Cracking is illegal, but *apparently* in times of war, encouraged.)
Pretty interesting when considered.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
[not to be confused woth the US Chess Federation]. The Air Force started as an extention of the Army in the early 20th century. Later it becais the USAAF (US Army Air Force). Then finally the Air Force separated into it's own division. And now following the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force might this be the beginnings of a the 5th branch of the Milirary? The Cyber Force? Of course, we'll need the Cyber Reserves. And ad campaigns. "Join the cyber reserves. It's just 2 weeks of hacking a year, and one weekend a month, and in return, you can go to college prepaid!" We'll need Cyber Force boot camp too. "OK, you script kiddie maggots! Your first training task will be to try and crash the secured fileservers in that building over there! You will each be provided with a laptop and a modem. You will use your training and the skills you were provided with to bring down the enemy. If you lose your laptop, or crash your hard drive, you will not be able to return home!" etc. We'll have cyber force drafts, draft dodgers, anti-cyber force protestors. It'll be great. Congress will allocate billions for the Cyber Force. Electronic weapons development, EMP cannons the likes of which have never been seen. Virus development. And the geeks will profit big time. I'll be first in line.
The Washington Times is not known as a particularly reliable newspaper. It's owned and operated by the Unification Church -- better known as the Moonies -- and runs to the extreme right wing quite a bit of the time.
If something is reported in the Washington Times and not picked up by the Post or the New York Times, you can bet that it's the Moonies getting it wrong yet again.
Can we really take the "Liberation Army Daily" seriously as a publication when their journalistic integrity has been called into question on so many occasions?
I mean who can forget the time when they ran the story about the red army sargeant deep undercover as a slightly plump Ms. Lewinsky? What about their coverage of the Tonya Harding affair? Can you say biased?
I think its time we realized that "KGB Today" is probably the only unbiased, reliable news source left in the world.
Hotnutz.com
One of the signs that a story has been "placed" by a PR firm is when the story gives extensive attention to a single source--who coincidentally has just published a book on the subject. That seems to be the case here--William Triplett is identified as the author of a new book, Red Dragon Rising .
One of the threats that Triplett explicitly raises is that the Chinese might be able to use Internet warfare to raise havoc in petroleum refineries--causing fires, spills, etc. He emphasizes that oil refineries are generally located close together, as though this represents some kind of danger.
That reminded me of something--I've already read this book, only it was a novel. Back in 1986 Tom Clancy and Larry Bond wrote a thriller entitled Red Storm Rising (Clancy, Red Storm Rising, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1986). The story begins with an attack by Muslim terrorists on a massive petroleum refinery in central Russia. One of the terrorists uses computer commands to wreak havoc--causing spills, igniting fires, and causing mass destruction. The fires destroy a major portion of the Soviet Union's petroleum industry, because all the refineries are located so close together.
Whether, and how, the U.S. might respond to a concerted Internet attack is an interesting question. But I wonder if this guy represents a credible source....
It's interesting that China's interest in such activities (if real or invented hype) is portrayed as something bad, evil and dangerous to America.
I am sure that the US has its own info-war corps at training right now and they will use the very same methods for the sake of western civilization.
Funny that other nations' troops are always the evil guys, despite using the same actions, tactics and weapons during war.
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You may like my a cappella music
The internet is -constantly- under attack. Or, the other way of looking at it, is that the internet is a great big training-grounds for cyberwarfare. We have our defense specialists (sysadmins, netadmins, and the OpenBSD project... :)) constantly engaging in 'wargames' with our 'black ops' teams (the (cr|h)acker 'community').
...
When black 'hits' they (usually) only mark their 'kill' with a label.
Now, given that at least a good quarter-to-a-third of the (cr|h)ackers (and usually the better ones, at that) are politically motivated, I think it's a pretty good bet that they'd lash out hard against any nation that began waging cyberwarfare against civilians. (The response would be more mixed for military-target-only, of course, and both sides might gain unofficial 'cyberwarriors' in many situations.)
Final notes -
Any refinery, factory, etc, that has their real
world device controls accessible to the internet should be immediately be dissolved on the basis of congenital idiocy and criminal negligence leading to the endangerment of lots of lives.
'Cyberwar' is a really stupid term. Some one come up with a better one, -please-. 'Information war' sounds more like propaganda-warfare. 'Internet war' probably won't catch on. Don't even -think- 'e-war' or 'iWar'
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
If you are designing a system which has serious consequences of failure (e.g. hospital monitors, flight or air traffic control, power grid, etc), you have to be careful. Perhaps even paranoid.
Putting such a system on the Internet is simply irresponsible, especially where lives are at stake. The military knows this pretty well. The civilian sector... well, I would hope they understand this too. But it wouldn't surprise me to see some problem areas.
Best regards,
SEAL
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This article serves a few functions:
1.
To make sure the average citizen is anti-chinese, or to make sure Americans stay patriotic. The whole nuclear secrets scandal was shown to basically be a scam, this is similar territory, at least in it's purpose.
2.
To maintain legitimacy for our military and to increase support for military funding. Notice how the article mentioned something like 39 million dollars being allocated to "protect computers".
This stuff tends to work on a society that is short on facts and long on tabloid bullshit. Lets face it, there are VERY few people who know anything on this topic, including those in high level government positions. Since most people take the media to be the accepted version of truth, they buy it. Of course people don't trust the media nearly as much as they used to, but this is still true for the most part.
Any country that wants to be a player in the next century *should* be developing this type of technology. Who doubts that the US is way ahead of the Chinese in this technology anyway? The US gets all whipped up anytime some country even hints that they might be increasing their military in some fashion, even though we easily have the most powerful arsenal on the planet.
This is just another piece of extreme right-wing xenophobic rhetoric.
didn't they buy that special cracking program from a Chinese operative?
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This article sounds like phear mongering to me. Like this...
The cyber-attacks followed the May 7 bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade and were viewed by some U.S. national security officials as possible government-sponsored information-warfare attacks on the United States.
You're an American student who happens to know how to crack computers. In an unrelated (to you) Chinese conflict, they bomb a U.S. embassy and kill a number of American citizens. What do you do that night?
Information warfare is a natural step into the Information Age. Don't be scared, just be cautious. If you want to look for an Information Age Pearl Harbor or equivalent war-starting (building) atrocity think about a really nasty Melissa/Bubbleboy/BO2K coupled with a million dedicated (and crafty) young men working from the comfort of their homes behind the Great Firewall.
Just some initial thoughts on what will be an interesting topic to follow. I'd REALLY like to hear from some Chinese geeks.
+&x
Comment removed based on user account deletion
True story: dropping oversize condoms onto enemy troops to demoralize them. The US actually did this during vietnam.
Oooh, you have such very large penises. We bow before your gargantuan members. Surely men with such large penises have nothing to fear from us. Our penises are soo small.
(that show is too funny, ROTFL every Wed @ 11(M))
+&x
The fact that the Washington Times is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church (the Moonies) and radical right-wing anti-communist, leaves me suspicous about the story. The Times has been a supporter of SDI (Star Wars), higher military spending, and quick to jump on the conspiracy bandwagon. The author of the article, Bill Gertz, has written a book called Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security which is basically a diatribe on how America (and Bill Clinton in particular) has sold out to the Chinese and the Russians allowing them to create newer weapons of mass destruction and cripple the US military at the same time. The amazon.com site alone speaks volumes about how this writer's views.
The article itself raves of an oncoming the war with the Evil Communist Chinese Empire creating an anti-capitalism internet branch to their military. Yeah, the same government who has been begging and pleading to be able to do trade with the rest of the world is going to destroy the Internet, right before they invade the US ("Go Wolverines!"). I especially like the touch of the unnamed "senior Pentagon official" being informed, but not actually having an opinion on the subject. And then there is the expert, William Triplett, and his rabid anti-China book Red Dragon Rising who spouts off that those crafty Chinese will one day the US oil refineries though the Internet. Yesh. I like it better when Sandra Bullock was fighting evil in The Net. Rampant xenophobia rears it's ugly head.
-S. Louie
"I may be Love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."
I have a hard time choking that FUD down.
.mil domains? How many "dangerous teeange hackers" gained access by exploiting age old exploits? I'm not in any way condoning such acts, personally, I'd leave the .mil computers alone, but let's face it, we are not looking at an electronic Pearl Harbor. And, how many of you want to bet that pretty soon we are going to see someone cry to Congress complaining about "the evil nations trying to crack our computer networks?"
First of all, our military has a tendency to over-exagerate things. How many "sophisicated, coordinated attacks" turns out to be script kiddies running NMAP randomly on
The general public, as a rule of thumb, is pretty ignorant. And ignorant people are always afraid of the unknown. That's what FUD's made of. Case in point:
Communists + Nuclear "Secrets"
Communists + Cyber attacks.
Issues like these are meant to generate anti-Chinese sentiments. "Chinese students at American universities might be trained for cyber attacks?" Unless the author can back that up, that's slander to a lot of students.
Secondly, who is to say that the US doesn't have infowar capabilities? At DefCon in Las Vegas, there was a talk given about EMP bombs - developed by the Army. Military commanders know how the game is played. You develop a weapon, someone else develop a similar weapon as a counter. And, in most cases, the spread of these weapons, in the hands of rational heads of States, allows us to have checks and balances in place. Chinese government officials aren't dumb, they know that if they launched an unprovoked attack they can be sure to face retalliations.
Just my 2 cents.
-=- SiKnight
The main paper is "The People's Daily" (renmin ribao). It may be full of bs sometimes, but it is politically correct news. Usually contains some rant about hegemony or something somewhere.
The next level down are city level papers like "Beijing Daily" and "Chongqing Daily". These are less under central control, and more likely to report things a little more accurately or with less propoganda and moralizing.
The third level are special interest newspapers like "Shipping News" or "The People's Liberation Army Daily" or perhaps old part relics like "Information Reference" (xiaoxi cankao, this is more reliable, but more propaganda-ish) . These are the least reliable (in my opinion). Since they have less prestige and relics of the past, they put out more radical stuff to sell papers...
Also, sometimes the papers a little more distant from the People's Daily are used as test beds for new ideas or to create hype... The "Ming Pao" paper in Hong Kong did this during the summer, with lots of talk about invading Taiwan.
I'm assuming this article is not to make foreigners scared (this newspaper is directed to internal readers) and instead just to move papers. The military is big stuff in China -- much more obvious than in the US. Lots of people read "military news" or like "Military Affairs" (junshi)
the People's Liberation Army Daily site (down? probably in gb-chinese as well)
a Beijing Scene article on the recent war fever in China (Beijing Scene is a popular expat weekly in Beijing)
Also, quite seriously, who in their right mind wouldn't be thinking about this type of stuff in this day and age. I mean... like other
Sometimes I get the feeling that people just like to pick on China -- or feel some sort of psychic need to let it fill the spot left by the USSR's collapse. They've drawn a shitty lot (the Chinese), at try thinking from their perspective every once in a while.
maybe I've been here too long.
willis.
there is no thing
what else could you want?
China is underestimated, but to say that an attack on the internet is going to cripple the US military is simply foolish. You could fry every backbone on the internet, and the US military would keep on ticking. Even our commercial economy would remain relatively unimpeded (at the current time atleast); the internet represents a relatively small portion of our GDP. Our military industrial capacity is still huge--which is what really determines war (baring nukes); However, something along the lines of an EMP (e.g.: wipe out phone networks, switching stations, etc) is an entirely different story, and has the potential to mess us (or anyone) up badly. Even if all US military hardware is shielded, a complete failure in civilian electronics would cripple our ability to move troops, produce machinery, etc--in short it would be an excellent "first strike"...but an internet attack is nothing close to that.
Anyways, despite China's immense military power and their propensity to trample on their citizen's rights, I don't believe they have any interest in going to war with us. Worst Case: Mutually Assured Destriction, the end. Best Case: Conventional arms war (which strikes me as implausible)--the US has an edge in many ways. Namely, our industrial capacity is significantly larger (e.g.: the ability to turn out more tanks, planes, trucks, bombs, artillery, faster). It would be an ugly war no matter what; not in anyone's best interest. China is probably going to be the world's next great super power (besides the US) if things keep on going the way the way they have been. Why would their stable leadership want to do anything so brash?
One question: What do you think people said of Germany before WWI? You're making a very general statement about >1billion people over an extended period of time, extremely foolish. Furthermore, your view of the US is highly distorted. Get Real.
Yours Truly,
FallLine (with 2 feet firmly planted on the ground)
"the British for beating up on poor lowly Argentina (oops, we helped them in that)" /."
Actually, you didn't. Haig was used as a running boy by the UK to try & negotiate with the Argentinians. The only military action the USA was involved in was in the 1830's, in retaliation for something or other. There's a brief history lesson here for your education. Or just check a world map, compare the physical size of the UK vs Argentina. Woo, those bully boy Brits throwing their weight around protecting part of the UK - much as you might expect the US government to defend Hawaii, if attacked and occupied by a foreign power.
"Anti-Americanism is so frequent lately on
Might I suggest that you make things better by portraying yourself & fellow countrymen in a better light? Like by posting things that are actually true, instead of this pile of troll faeces?
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
"While I generally like Europeans and Canadians, you guys would roll over for any dictator or Totalitarian lot."
Yeah, just like the UK did when Hitler invaded Poland. Whilst the US stood by and did nothing until the Nazi threat became too large to ignore. Have you ever read any history?
I don't mean to disrespect your country or nationalism, but please do a little reading before you post inflammatory crap like this.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
The paper does exist. There are periodic stories from it in the South China Morning Post in HK. It is, of course, a propaganda tool. Recently, they had some pictures of mobilization of troops towards Tiawan, in an identifiable location with identifiable weapons.
They leak enough information to cause a bit of a stir. In the taiwan incident, the center of the missiles were covered, so specific identification of the type of missiles could not be made.
China is flexing their muscles. They wouldn't give up too much information for someone to be able to creat a counter-offensive, but they have objectives. (Like influencing the outcome of the Tiawan election, and becoming recognized as a superpower.)
The world is safe for another five years. If they are up to anything now, it is preparing to recapture some of their lost states, without the intervention of the US.
Interesting. My quick search also turned up nothing... Then again, I doubt that too many people would be eager to admit a tactic like that. I've heard the same story though, except in the version I got, we dropped extra-large condoms, labelled as small, on the outlying islands of Japan.
The intention was demoralizing the potential 'human-shield' of stick-wielding peasants, who would need to be slaughtered if we committed to a conventional invasion. Due to their strong allegiance to the emperor, it was feared that peasants would be out on beaches, throwing rocks at the landing U.S. troops.
I think (grind-grind-grind - reaching WAY back) that the story came from a Political Science class, and stemmed from a lecture on the agruments for using nuclear weapons against Japan. Japanese civilian casualties were a major factor, and their patriarchial society was believed to be intimidatable (new word!!) by the 'giant American penis'.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.